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URBANISATION
AND NATURAL
DISASTERS
source:
www.unhabitat.org/programmes/
rdmu/documents/DMP%20Concept.pdf
www.fig.net/pub/athens/papers/
ps02/ps02_2_kotter.pdf
Draft Report of the Second Session of the World Urban Forum Barcelona, Spain, 13 - 17 September 2004
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In the last decade, more than 200 million people were annually affected by natural disasters. Increasingly researchers find that land use and land use change play a key role in global climate change. The change of non built-up areas into built areas is a key contributor…- the impact of climate change on cities includes flooding and landslides, sea level rise affecting coastal cities, extreme temperature fluctuations, water shortages, windstorms and other extreme weather events, air pollution, and intensification of urban heat islands;
- according to the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the sea level is expected to rise worldwide from 8 to 88 cm during the 21st century, mainly due to thermal expansion of water and the melting of glaciers and ice caps. Many cities are located on, or close to, the shore and are therefore directly subject to the effects of sea-level rise;
- especially reclaimed low level lands - whether reclaimed formally or informally - are vulnerable. Cities that are likely to be affected can be found on all continents, for example Alexandria in Egypt; Banjul in the Gambia, Tianjin in China, Jakarta in Indonesia, and Bangkok in Thailand;
- the IPCC estimates that between 1 and 70 million coastal residents inAfrica may be affected by flooding by 2080, most of them living in cities;
- many cities in less developed countries are built on ecologically fragile foundations, or are vulnerable to such natural disasters as earthquakes, floods, and destructive storms. Invariably, natural disasters in cities kill or injure members of low-income groups disproportionately because the poor often live in unsafe housing on land susceptible to flooding or landslides. The loss of homes, possessions, and often livelihood because of a natural disaster often leads to further impoverishment;
- the urban poor are everywhere forced to settle on hazardous and otherwise unbuildable terrains—over-steep hillslopes, river banks and floodplains. Poverty, as a result, has ‘constructed’ an urban disaster problem of unprecedented frequency and scope, as typified by chronic flooding in Manila, Dhaka and Rio, pipeline conflagrations in Mexico City and Cubatão (Brazil), the Bhopal catastrophe in India, a munitions plant explosion in Lagos, and deadly mudslides in Caracas, La Paz and Tegucigalpa;
- take, for example, the case of Caracas: on December 1999, floods and mudslides brought on by heavy rains in the northern and central coast of Venezuela left an estimated 30,000 dead or missing and up to 600,000 homeless. Almost half the country was devastated and never completely recovered. Most of these casualties were in the Caracas metropolitan area, where highly vulnerable squatter settlements perched on steep hillsides were severely affected by mudslides.
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